from the failure-to-adapt dept

About a month ago, Buzzfeed's founder and CEO, Jonah Peretti summed up my feelings about watching old news media organizations running around everywhere blaming Google and Facebook for their own failure to innovate:

“A lot of the traditional media players are opportunistically attacking Facebook and Google because Facebook and Google have figured out a better model for delivering information and entertaining people which is real-time, personalised, shareable and global – all these things that you can't do in broadcast and print,” he says.

“These traditional media companies have had decades of massive cashflow and they decided to stockpile that instead of investing in digital. They just kept managing earnings on their traditional businesses even though we have known for 20-plus years that the internet was going to be a big thing and now all these things have unfolded, with some surprises but in a way that was not that hard to predict. Now we are at the point where Facebook’s and Google's revenues are starting to be a substantial portion of the pie, they are attacking them, saying it is unfair.

“The truth is that Facebook and Google have always taken a long term perspective – so has Netflix, so has Amazon – that the internet would win out in the end. A lot of the big media companies always took a quarter-to-quarter perspective, a maximise earnings perspective, and that has resulted in them being in a tough position and so they attack Facebook and Google because of it.”

This is, more or less, what we've been arguing for nearly two decades. There are a ton of opportunities for these companies if they actually embraced digital -- but they did so in drips and drabs and often stupidly chasing fads, rather than actually figuring out how to deliver content that people actually wanted in a way they wanted it. So, for the past few years, they've focused on whining about how it's so gosh darn unfair that the companies who did figure it out -- Google and Facebook -- are now making lots of money.

And... now those legacy firms are seeking the nuclear option. The News Media Alliance -- formerly the Newspaper Association of America -- has spent the last few years pushing bad idea after bad idea to try to "save" the news organizations that failed to actually innovate (for example: asking Trump to whittle away fair use). We mocked the fair use proposal as complete nonsense, but in order to make it happen, the News Media Alliance is... asking the government for a special exception to antitrust law to allow its members to collude against Google and Facebook... and to generally make the internet less interesting and more expensive.

Today, the News Media Alliance – representing almost 2,000 news organizations – called on Congress to allow publishers to negotiate collectively with dominant online platforms. The objective is to permit publishers to have concrete discussions with the two dominant distributors of online news content, Google and Facebook, on business model solutions to secure the long-term availability of local journalism produced by America’s newsrooms.

Supposedly there are three goals here: to get greater copyright control over news and to create a snippet tax, to force Google and Facebook to work with news organizations on some sort of subscription program, and to get "a fair share" of revenue and user data. None of these make much sense. As Matt Schruers at the Disruptive Competition Project points out, all three of these goals have issues:

Let’s consider those three objectives: IP protection, subscriptions, and a “fair share” of revenue and data. First, news publishers do not need an antitrust exemption to lobby for more IP protection; federal law already allows it. (As I’ve noted before, News Corp. is already quite fond of doing so.)

Second, Google and Facebook are already pursuing new strategies for supporting subscriptions. The NMA proposal, however, suggests a collective turn to subscription models, removing consumers’ ability to choose among products with different business models, including ad-supported ones. Individual newspapers should have the freedom to experiment, pursuing the model best suited to their business. Consumers are best served when they can choose between competing models.

Third, Chavern wants a “fair share of revenue and data.” In pursuit of this, the NMA would make an end-run around copyright law’s fair use doctrine, which permits the indexing of content, so as to force digital services to pay for the privilege of sending traffic to their sites. As I discuss below, news publishers have tried this in Europe. It hasn’t gone well.

There are lots of other problems here as well. As Mathew Ingram pointed out, there's tremendous hubris in the NMA members thinking that they're the only ones producing quality journalism:

This sense of entitlement is at the core of what the NMA is proposing. In effect, it is suggesting that mainstream newspaper companies are the only entities capable of producing quality journalism, and therefore they deserve a get-out-of-jail-free card so they can engage in what amounts to collusion. And they are hoping Congress will see Google and Facebook as the enemy.

Here’s a thought: What if these newspaper companies had spent a little more time trying to compete over the past decade or so, instead of relying on their historic market control to keep their profits rolling in? What if more had tried to improve their websites and their mobile versions, so that users wouldn’t install ad blockers, or turn to other solutions like Facebook Instant Articles?

Every single competitive threat the newspaper industry has faced, from Craigslist to Facebook, has been visible long before it decimated the industry’s profits, and most of the newspapers in the NMA did little or nothing to deal with them until it was too late.

Indeed, some more local news organizations are already pushing back against the NMA's plans. The Local Media Consortium, which admits some overlap with NMA members, points out that this whole thing seems like the wrong approach:

First, Chavern’s position ignores the LMC’s work during the last four years forging partnerships essential to us as providers of quality local content and local business solutions. Those partnerships align the news industry – print, broadcast and ultimately digital – with tech companies in a symbiotic relationship. The LMC has provided revenue opportunities for all levels of local media – and we’ve done that while leveraging our scale to garner both the attention and respect of the tech platforms. We have built partnerships based on shared value, not entitlement.

Second, I am concerned about the mixed messages the NMA’s stance is creating within the industry and our own LMC membership. The NMA board includes several members of the LMC, and these board members may not be fully aware of our relationship with tech companies. Chavern’s op-ed suggests a lack of knowledge of the tens of millions of dollars our partnership with Google has netted the industry, or the inroads we have made influencing innovation with Google, Facebook, Apple and Yahoo

That is, the LMC is looking at new tech and innovation as an opportunity. The NMA, on the other hand, seems to be looking at it as the enemy. This is a fairly typical response for legacy industries who failed to adapt, then flail about wildly against those who succeeded, but it's never good for consumers (there's a reason we don't allow collusion to happen after all...).

Look, I get it. Google and Facebook are big and successful and making lots of money. And because these news organizations failed to do much to adapt (or, at best, made superficial embraces of digital), they're pissed and they blame Google and Facebook for their own failures (not unlike the recording and film industries). But that misses the point. There's a reason why this happened, and we shouldn't have the US government reward those who didn't innovate by taxing those who did. The end result would be bad for the public. It would be bad for innovation.

And, sure, I'm saying this as a news publication that is concerned about Google and Facebook's power in the market -- but it's on me to figure out how to adapt and leverage the benefits that platforms like that (and others) bring. Not to go running to the government seeking to collude with others and to cement weak business models in place. Frankly, for companies seeking to blame others rather than their own failures, it's probably best that they go out of business sooner, rather than later. Clear the field for others who are willing to innovate and embrace technology, rather than whine about it.

from the obvious-integrity dept

The cable and broadcast industry goes to some amusing lengths to downplay cord cutting and streaming competition's impact on ratings and subscriber totals. Initially the impulse was just to insist that cord cutting wasn't real. When the data made outright denial impossible, the industry began insisting cord cutting was only something done by irrelevant nobodies living in mom's basement or Millennials who would see the error of their ways once they procreated. Of course data repeatedly showed that these people were the norm, and now we're looking at potentially one of the biggest quarterly subscriber losses in television history.

As ratings have reflected the industry's dying cash cow, they've also taken consistent aim at viewership measurement systems as well. A bone of particular contention has been Nielsen, which is stuck between trying to accurately measure the damage and cater to myopic cable and broadcast clients that can't hear well with their heads buried firmly in the sand. A few years ago, Nielsen was forced to stop publicizing the rise in broadband-only (not TV) households. More recently, ESPN tried to publicly shame Nielsen when the company accurately highlighted the massive subscriber exodus happening at the channel.

But the cable and broadcast industry has been engaged in some other notable shenanigans to try and protect the illusion that everything is going swimmingly. The Wall Street Journal indicates that the industry has increasingly been going so far as to intentionally misspell their programs in program listings. Why? Because when they know a show is going to see a ratings dip, listing it under another name prevents its core listing from being impacted in the Nielsen ratings:

"That explains the appearance of "NBC Nitely News," which apparently aired on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend this year, when a lot of people were away from their TVs. The retitling of “NBC Nightly News” fooled Nielsen’s automated system, which listed “Nitely” as a separate show. Hiding the May 26 program from Nielsen dramatically improved the show’s average viewership that week," the report adds. "Instead of falling further behind first-place rival 'ABC World News Tonight,' NBC news narrowed the gap."

The Journal goes on to note how this has been a sort of "open secret" in the industry for several years, but as cord cutting has begun to accelerate, its use has increased. At one point, NBC intentionally misspelled "NBC Nitely News" every night for a week. And all of this appears to be happening with the blessing of Nielsen, which again tries to walk a tightrope between being taken seriously as a rating metric system and keeping paying cable and broadcast clients happy with manufactured tales from fantasy land.

For its part, NBC issued a statement that features a number of words, but at no point addresses the issue at hand:

"As is standard industry practice, our broadcast is retitled when there are pre-emptions and inconsistencies or irregularities in the schedule, which can include holiday weekends and special sporting events,” a show spokesman said."

from the good dept

Earlier this year, we brought to you the story of one man's quest to sue all of the news organizations for using a clip of his Facebook video in which his partner is giving birth to his child. Kali Kanongataa sued ABC, NBC, Yahoo, CBS, Microsoft, Rodale and COED Media Group for reporting on the video and showing a clip of it, claiming copyright infringement. It was an odd claim for many reasons, not the least of which being that Kanongataa made the stream public and available on his Facebook page, not to mention the obvious Fair Use case to be made by the news groups reporting on the matter. The suits didn't work, of course, with most or all of them having now been dismissed.

No reasonable lawyer with any familiarity with the law of copyright could have thought that the fleeting and minimal uses, in the context of news reporting and social commentary, that these defendants made of tiny portions of the 45-minute video was anything but fair.

That's a fairly damning statement on the court records for the legal staff of Kanongataa, though it stopped short of sanctioning them. Instead, Kanongataa's lawyers will have managed to get him saddled with these court fees by entertaining this litigious nonsense. Judge Kaplan goes on to state that the case was frivolous and that these fee assessments should serve as a good deterrent in order to "better serve the purposes of the Copyright Act." That purpose is not to reward people who see a payday in the form of plainly Fair Use reporting. And we're not talking about pennies in legal fees, either.

Hence, the media outlets that were on the receiving end of the lawsuit are entitled to recover what may amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs. Kanongataa's lawyers from New York—Yekaterina Tsyvkin and Richard Liebowitz—did not immediately respond for comment. The judge gave the media companies three weeks to say how much they think they should be awarded in costs associated with defending the lawsuit.

Big dollars, yes, but that's warranted to keep this sort of thing from regularly mucking up the court docket. Copyright's purpose isn't a get rich quick scheme.

from the noncognito dept

While the Boston Globe has had a paywall on its site for some time -- the metered sort that lets you read a certain number of articles for free before insisting you sign up for an account with a subcription -- that paywall also featured an open tunnel allowing anyone running their browsers in private or incognito mode to drive right through it. This workaround was well known and used since at least 2014, although hunting around on google search results seems to make it clear that this was all found out because people generally like to use privacy and incognito modes in their browsers for the very reasons the browsers developed them: security and privacy.

The Boston Globe website is closing off a hole in its paywall by preventing visitors who aren't logged in from reading articles in a browser's private mode.

"You're using a browser set to private or incognito mode" is the message given to BostonGlobe.com visitors who click on articles in private mode. "To continue reading articles in this mode, please log in to your Globe account." People who aren't already Globe subscribers are urged to subscribe.

It's a strange request for a couple of reasons. First, many privacy modes don't even keep sites from tracking what you're doing. They do, however, tend to limit the ability to track you across multiple different sites as you browse. Second, there is still a laughably easy workaround for anyone that wants to keep seeing free articles from the Boston Globe without a subscription: simply delete all cookies from the Boston Globe off of your computer and, voila, you get more free articles. Regardless of both, punishing readers for their privacy concerns probably isn't the best way to build subscription bases.

Logging into the website in private mode puts your privacy at risk, he said. "By logging in you make it easy for them to keep tracking you, to keep building their (advertising) user profiles," he said. "They may also sync their tracking data with their advertising partners whereas if you hadn't logged in, those advertising partners might see a new visitor for every new incognito session."

It's worth noting that this isn't a technical limitation, but a choice that the Globe is making almost certainly for those advertising reasons. There are many newspaper sites that have managed to allow for free articles in privacy modes, such as The Chicago Tribune and USA Today. Whatever you think of paywalls generally, I can't imagine how this disregard for readers' privacy choices builds a path to long term paywall success.

from the by-all-means,-let's-allow-the-DOJ-to-decide-who's-a-real-journalist dept

In his testimony yesterday in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey became the latest government official to speak out against Wikileaks. In doing so -- even though he very carefully worded his answers to Sen. Ben Sasse's softballs -- Comey also made a very dangerous insinuation about what separates "real" journalists from Wikileaks.

SASSE: [T]here is room for reasonable people to disagree about at what point an allegedly journalistic organization crosses a line to become some sort of a tool of foreign intelligence. There are Americans, well-meaning, thoughtful people who think that WikiLeaks might just be a journalistic outfit. Can you explain why that is not your view?

COMEY: Yes and again, I want to be careful that I don't prejudice any future proceeding. It's an important question, because all of us care deeply about the First Amendment and the ability of a free press, to get information about our work and -- and publish it.

To my mind, it crosses a line when it moves from being about trying to educate a public and instead just becomes about intelligence porn, frankly. Just pushing out information about sources and methods without regard to interest, without regard to the First Amendment values that normally underlie press reporting. And simply becomes a conduit for the Russian intelligence services or some other adversary of the United States just to push out information to damage the United States. And I realize, reasonable people as you said, struggle to draw a line…

So, where does the journalistic publishing of leaked documents cross the line into "intelligence porn?" Comey says the difference between real journalists and Wikileaks is real journalists seek input from the government before publishing.

Comey: [T]here's at least a portion and people can argue that maybe this conduct WikiLeaks has engaged in, in the past that's closer to regular newsgathering. But in my view, a huge portion of WikiLeaks's activities has nothing to do with legitimate newsgathering, informing the public, commenting on important public controversies, but is simply about releasing classified information to damage the United States of America. And -- and -- and people sometimes get cynical about journalists.

American journalists do not do that. They will almost always call us before they publish classified information and say, is there anything about this that's going to put lives in danger, that's going to jeopardize government people, military people or -- or innocent civilians anywhere in the world.And then work with us to try and accomplish their important First Amendment goals while safeguarding those interests. This activity I'm talking about, WikiLeaks, involves no such considerations whatsoever. It's what I said to intelligence porn, just push it out in order to damage.

The First Amendment contains no such requirement to run leaked documents past the government first. This can be an ethical decision on the part of the publisher, but the notion that the First Amendment only covers publishing after government input has been sought is a dangerous one. This assertion by Comey also just isn't true. As Trevor Timm pointed out on Twitter, Wikileaks hasattempted to contact the US government in the past before publication, but has been ignored.

Furthermore, Comey and Sasse both claim Wikileaks' publications have caused some sort of damage to government employees. They offered unproven assertions it has endangered lives, even though the evidence shows the worst the US government (and its employees) suffered is some embarrassment.

The only mitigating factor was Comey's assertion that the DOJ isn't interested in using espionage laws to prosecute journalists for publishing leaked documents. As he correctly points out, the culpability lies with the person leaking the documents, not the journalists publishing them. Of course, this statement isn't being made in a vacuum. It's being made in the current political climate where the president has expressed an interest in reducing free speech protections. The DOJ itself appears to be working towards prosecuting Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents. All that can really be gathered from Comey's assertions is that the DOJ may not prosecute journalists who run everything past the government before publication.

This delineation between "legitimate" journalism and "intelligence porn" is disturbing. It suggests the government still wants to have the final say on who is or isn't a journalist and punish accordingly. If this had been the attitude since the beginning of this nation, it's doubtful we'd have as many protections as we enjoy today. Rob Graham of Errata Security sums up Comey's statements in a single, unforgettable sentence:

If this were 1776, Comey would of course be going after Thomas Paine, for publishing "revolution porn", and not being a real journalist.

from the abort! dept

The saga of Facebook Live marches on, I suppose. The social media giant's bid to get everyone to live-stream content that mostly appears to be wholly uninteresting has nevertheless produced some interesting legal stories as a result. The latest of these is the conclusion of a string of lawsuits filed by a man who used Facebook Live to stream the birth of his child over copyright infringement against many, many news organizations that thought his act was newsworthy.

It was in May of 2016 that Kali Kanongataa accidentally publcly streamed his wife birthing the couple's son. He had intended for the stream to only be viewable to friends and family, but had instead made the stream viewable by pretty much everyone. Even after realizing he'd done so, Kanongataa kept the stream public, leading over 100,000 people to view the video -- including some folks in several news organizations, who used snippets of the stream in news stories about the couple's decision to stream this most intimate of moments.

And then came the lawsuits.

In September, Kanongataa filed suit (PDF) against ABC and Yahoo for showing portions of his video on Good Morning America as well as the ABC news website and a Yahoo site that hosts ABC content. He also sued COED Media Group and iHeartMedia. In October, he sued magazine publisher Rodale over a clip and screenshot used on the website for its magazine Women's Health. Last month, he sued Cox Communications.

In November, ABC lawyers filed a motion (PDF) calling their client's use of the Kanongataa clip a "textbook example of fair use." ABC used 22 seconds of a 45 minute video in order to produce a news story that would "enable viewers to understand and form an opinion about the couple's actions."

ABC's motion, embedded below, goes on to patiently explain to the court and, presumably, to Kanongataa's crack legal representation, that the entire point of the Fair Use defense was to allow small amounts of works to be used for the purpose of commentary and in news stories. Were lawsuits like this one to be victorious, news in the era of the image would come to a screeching halt. And, since the stories generated by these news organizations centered on the newsworthy nature of a couple streaming this sort of thing in the first place, use of such clips and images was perfectly in line with Fair Use usage in their reports.

The presiding judge, Lewis Kaplan, appears to have understood this correctly, having tossed the lawsuit against ABC and the other defendants.

Judge Kaplan's order shuts down Kanongataa's lawsuit against ABC, NBC, Yahoo, and COED Media Group. A lawsuit against CBS and Microsoft was dropped in November, possibly due to a settlement. The case against Rodale is still pending and is also being overseen by Judge Kaplan. Kanongataa's lawsuit against Cox was filed in a different district and remains pending in the Eastern District of New York.

This really is about as textbook a case of Fair Use as there could possibly be, leading us to wonder what in the world the legal team Kanongataa had hired was thinking in filing this in the first place.

from the loads-gun,-points-at-foot dept

It never fails (although the proposed solution often does): when faced with the struggles of operating news organizations in the internet era, far too many industry leaders suggest someone else should pay for their failing business models.

The favorite target is Google. Google has somehow destroyed the profitability of news media companies by creating an incredibly successful search engine. Even though its search engine directs users to news agencies' websites, there are those in the industry that believe incoming traffic isn't enough to offset their perception that the search engine somehow piggybacks off their success, rather than the other way around.

So-called "Google taxes" have been passed into law in countries around the world. In every case, they've been a disaster. In Spain, new agencies begged to have the law rolled back after losing traffic from Google searches. Having seen what didn't work in Spain, Austrian lawmakers floated the same idea, proposing a tax on SINGLE WORDS in search results. The latest bad idea is an EU-wide "snippet tax," because it worked so well in Spain, Spanish newspapers begged the EU to step in and block Google from killing its news article search results in Spain in response to the proposed tax.

Tax changes, better copyright protection and fees imposed on Facebook and Google are among the solutions being touted to help rescue Canada's ailing news industry, internal reports show.

Those suggestions were prominent in closed-door sessions with news leaders conducted by the Public Policy Forum, a think-tank the federal government has hired to suggest policies in support of Canadian journalism during a period of digital disruption and reporter layoffs.

So, there's also a "Facebook tax" proposal, one that originates from the country's ongoing efforts to support local creations and content. Those pushing a form of Google tax are suggesting this would be no different than the government's levying of fees on cable companies whose programming didn't contain enough Canadian-made content.

"Perhaps this could be [a] concept … applied in the digital space, establishing charges on news aggregators and foreign content producers such as Facebook, Google, Netflix and National Newswatch to subsidize made-in-Canada content."

Perhaps. It's definitely a "concept" and one that could be "applied" to digital space… but only if the Canadian government wishes to see foreign content producers pull out of the Canadian market. (And, as the CBC notes, the think tank quoted doesn't appear to know that National Newswatch is actually a Canadian media company. That kind of "thinking" is going to get in the way of itself if these are the minds crafting new media policies.)

And there's really no explanation for this:

"Canadian policy-makers should consider whether copyright laws that govern file-sharing in the music industry could be applied in the news industry," with some arguing for a 24-hour period of exclusivity.

Exclusivity is impossible to guarantee on the internet, so unless the legislature is willing to criminalize this form of… I don't know, infringement(?), then there's little that can be done to guarantee 24 hours of exclusivity to any media company. Not only that, but the web is world-wide, and Canadians are free to bring their eyeballs and clicks to foreign sites not subject to any ridiculous 24-hour exclusivity "rights."

As for the file-sharing, I don't even know where to start. Are newspapers going to sue readers for sharing paywalled content or posting links to Facebook? Is unauthorized consumption of news the new piracy?

Better suggestions are made elsewhere in the report, although these still rely on taxing others to prop up struggling industries.

Change tax rules to allow philanthropic support of journalism by charitable or non-profit foundations. "Under existing rules, it becomes difficult to establish the type of independent, non-profit news model that has proven so successful in the United States through ProPublica," says the interim report.

Create tax incentives and exemptions to encourage coverage of local news. Investors, for example, could get special tax credits for putting money into local, non-profit digital news startups.

Review the role of the government-financed CBC, which has moved into digital news space and — according to some publishers — has undermined the private sector's abilities to attract ad dollars. (The CBC has since proposed that it abandon all advertising, relying solely on increased public funding.)

In every case, there's a look to Canadian citizens' pocketbooks to subsidize media entities that, for whatever reason, Canadians haven't felt like supporting directly.

This is still in its discussion phase, but the summary report points to a lot of bad ideas bubbling to the top. If Canada wants to turn news media into government-subsidized industries, it's going to do at least as much damage to the quality of reporting as their current financial struggles. Any perception of indebtedness to the government will work against these agencies, undermining their reporting and creating doubts of impartiality in the minds of their readers.

As for the various taxes of US companies to subsidize falling Canadian newspapers sales, hopefully a longer look at the proposals will reveal the unintended negative consequences of these plans before both Canadians and Canadian media companies pay the belated price for their short-term thinking.

from the censorship-made-easy dept

One of the wonders of the internet was that it was supposed to be a distributed computer system, meaning that it would be harder to take down and harder to censor. But, over time, things keep getting more and more centralized. And that's especially true in the mobile ecosystem, and doubly so for the Apple iOS mobile ecosystem (at least on Android it's much easier to sideload apps). The latest demonstration of this is that Apple agreed to remove apps from the NY Times from its iOS app store in China, complying with demands from the Chinese government:

Apple removed both the English-language and Chinese-language apps from the app store in China on Dec. 23. Apps from other international publications, including The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, were still available in the app store.

“We have been informed that the app is in violation of local regulations,” Fred Sainz, an Apple spokesman, said of the Times apps. “As a result, the app must be taken down off the China App Store. When this situation changes, the App Store will once again offer the New York Times app for download in China.”

The article about this -- in the NY Times, naturally -- says that the paper has asked Apple to reconsider. No one is clear on exactly why this is happening, but the (reasonable) assumption is that it has to do with the new regulations China put in place over the summer that demand all internet news providers must be approved by the Chinese government -- which the Chinese are spinning as part of its effort to crack down on "fake news."

Of course, this really just highlights two separate, but equally worrisome trends: (1) the increasing centralization of connected ecosystems, that creates a single chokepoint to target with censorship demands; and (2) the ability to use hyped up claims about "fake news" to censor legitimate and critical investigative reporting. Neither of these are good to see, and both need to be counteracted.

from the i-love-you.-here's-your-new-muzzle. dept

We've talked a lot about how the trend du jour in online media is to ditch the news comment section, then condescendingly pretend this is because the website just really values user relationships. ReCode, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg, Popular Science and more have all proclaimed that they just love their on-site communities so much, they'll no longer allow them to speak. Of course what these sites often can't admit is that they were too lazy or cheap to cultivate their communities, can't seem to monetize quality discourse, and don't really like people pointing out their story errors in quite such a conspicuous location.

Vice recently decided to join this trend and announce it too would be killing comments. And, like most of its counterparts, Vice tries to push the narrative that this is being done because comment sections are just wild, untameable beasts, outside of the laws of physics and man, and irredeemable at best:

Unfortunately, website comments sections are rarely at their best. Without moderators or fancy algorithms, they are prone to anarchy. Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise.

Yes, go figure. When you ignore your barn and garden you get weeds, parasites and dry rot. This idea that there's just nothing that can be done about unruly commenters ignores studies like this one that suggest that often all that's needed to dramatically improve discourse is to have somebody from the website just show up and give half-a-fleeting damn. It's just easier to justify your apathy as an editor or business by trying to pretend that news comments are on par with solving the god-damned crisis in the Middle East.

On the plus side, Vice at least admits, albeit somewhat jokingly, that its editors "don't have the time or desire" to care about its readerships' thoughts. But Vice also, like so many sites before it, tries to insist that outsourcing all user interaction to the homogenized, noisy blandness of Facebook is "good enough":

We don't have the time or desire to continue monitoring that crap moving forward. Besides, there are plenty of other ways for you to publicly discuss our work and the personal worth of our staff. We'll still be reading your thoughts on Twitter and Facebook, and we legitimately do enjoy getting IRL mail (no bombs) sent to our offices in Brooklyn.

Part of this push is because editors want to return to the Walter Cronkite era practice of letters to the editors, where the outlet can more heavily filter what kind of user feedback is publicized. In this way killing off comments is an attack on transparency, since -- buried amidst the trolls and jackasses -- quite often sits very legitimate criticism, conversations with authors, corrections and valuable insight. Offload that to Facebook, and what ultimately happens is these user voices are simply drowned out by sheer volume. All while reducing the time the readers you claim to value spend on site (ingenious!).

Vice tops its missive off by trying to convince the babies being thrown out with the bathwater that censoring their ability to speak isn't a "slight against them":

We truly value thoughtful comments and critiques from readers, and our biggest worry in killing this section was that the people who have constructive and intelligent things to say would consider this a slight against them. Please don't think that. We know that the vast majority of you are hot, brilliant non-bigots who challenge us to be better every day. That doesn't change just because we're losing the ugly stuff at the bottom of our articles.

Except napalming your on-site community because you're too lazy to weed the garden certainly is a slight against those users. And as we saw with NPR, these users are well aware of this fact, and are more than happy to spend their time on websites that actually value conversation and user interaction, instead of just paying empty lip service to the concept.

from the this-is-really-dumb dept

Sometimes you wonder just how ridiculous some legacy industries can be. The latest is the News Media Alliance, which is apparently the new name of what was the Newspaper Association of America. Just a few months ago, we were mocking that organization's ridiculous proposal that readers of newspaper websites should be forced to allow invasive ad trackers, and that adblockers shouldn't be allowed. And believe it or not, now the group has even worse suggestions. It has sent a "white paper" to Donald Trump with the types of things it's looking for from a Trump administration. The white paper is really just a 3 page memo dressed up slightly with the term "white paper" at the top -- as opposed to a carefully developed plan.

But the really ridiculous bit is that these media publications -- who regularly rely on fair use, are asking Trump to dump fair use:

Strong copyright protection is needed. Newspaper content makes up approximately two-thirds of the content on news aggregation platforms such as Google News, but many of these relatively new players in the digital ecosystem build audiences and generate revenue from newspaper content with little if any revenue coming back to those who have invested in creating the original content. Today, the news media industry invests roughly $5 billion each year in long-form investigative journalism. Our nation’s copyright laws must be structured and implemented in a way that allows for a return on this massive investment. Today, outdated interpretations of copyright laws mean that the industry is currently forced to give away much of its product for free. The government needs to put in place copyright protections that allow news organizations and other content creators to fairly benefit from their critical efforts and investments.

“Fair use” should be reoriented toward its original meaning. Under current copyright law, a person that does not own a copyright may still use a copyrighted work if it is consistent with the “fair use” factors, which assess: (1) the purpose and character of the use, (2) the nature of the copyrighted work, (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and (4) the effect upon the potential market. The courts, unfortunately, have dramatically weakened this test by finding a fair use any time a new use could be seen as “transformative.” This test has undermined the integrity of the long-established fair use factors. As part of any Copyright Act rewrite, we support refocusing the fair-use test on its original purpose to prevent courts from undermining the Constitution’s encouragement of compensation to entities that generate creativity and productivity.

This is dumb on so many levels. First, the claim that newspapers don't get any revenue from the likes of Google is ridiculous, when you consider how much they whine and freak out if Google removes them from search. They get revenue in the form of traffic from aggregators. If they're bad at monetizing it, that's one thing, but that's not the aggregators' fault.

Second, copyright laws should never be designed with the idea of making sure it enables recouping an investment. Because copyright is not the business model. Copyright is a mechanism that creates a business model, and that business model may or may not be successful. Just saying you invest $5 billion and therefore copyright needs to cover that nut makes no sense. I could just as easily claim that I'm going to invest $5 billion in improving Techdirt -- and therefore Trump needs to make sure that there's a business model to allow me to recoup that? No, that's crazy. It's not the government's job to make sure your own bad business decisions still pay off.

Third: the media attacking fair use is insane. Newspapers regularly rely on fair use in their reporting, and the group is shooting itself in the foot in asking Trump to take away that tool. This is especially true given that Trump himself has insisted he wants to "open up our libel laws" with the specific aim of harming newspapers. Remember, this is the context in which he said he was going to open up such laws:

If I become President, oh, are they going to have problems. They're going to have such problems.

... One of the things I'm going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we're certainly leading. I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We're going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected.

.... So we're going to open up those libel laws, folks, and we're going to have people sue you like you've never got sued before...

While he was specifically talking about libel laws, as we've seen over and over again, copyright is an amazing tool for censorship as well. In fact, the Supreme Court itself has noted that fair use is the necessary "safety valve" on copyright's free speech stifling powers. So for newspapers to basically gift wrap to Trump a way in which he can pull back a tool that protects their free speech -- just as he's been promising to attack their free speech -- is ludicrous.

About the only saving grace in all of this is that Trump acts as if he hates the big newspapers so much, that perhaps he'll have no desire to make them happy by following through on this idiotic suggestion.

In the meantime, if you work for a news organization that is a member of the News Media Alliance, maybe ask them why they're undermining a core principle of free speech in asking for fair use to be limited?